


l'appel du vide.

by astrolatryy



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Cults, Loss of Parent(s), coping with losing your family by becoming an occult Indiana Jones, got some angst in the first half of the story, oh yeah the entity is there too at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29925831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolatryy/pseuds/astrolatryy
Summary: The sand in front of her glistens, ice-cold and dark.In the vision, in the dream that is not a dream, she kneels on the black shore and it feels as real as anything else. She plunges a finger into the ash-black shore and draws a circle; slashes a line through it on unnatural instinct.—Elodie Rakoto, and how she lost everything and filled the void with a search for answers.( or: an elaboration on Elodie's backstory. )
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	l'appel du vide.

This is the prologue:  
  
When Elodie was a kid, she never believed in ghosts. Nor the supernatural, nor magic. She was a pretty practical kid, all things considered. She loved to skip school to go exploring the streets of Paris, even though she was what—six? seven?—and a kid like her really shouldn't have been wandering out alone. 

She was an only child. Born to two parents who were part of an elite group of the wealthy, always busy with the work it entails; an accident, really, but one they decided to keep, and despite their work, they always had time for her.  
  
She remembers sprinting down the sidewalk, laughing, before she was swept up into her much larger father's arms; and even though there was worry in his eyes and a lecture in his voice, there was a poorly-hidden smile in his expression, too.  
  
And when he set her down he laughed and ruffled her hair and left her home, and even fourteen years later she remembers how happy that made her feel, to be by her father's side after another adventure, being led home. 

This is how the story starts:  
  
When she was fourteen—barely even a teenager, maybe still a preteen to some eyes—she went on one of her parents' business trips for the first time. To some obscure island; Dyer's Island (she'd never forget the name), and the day before the trip she got her hands on a map of the island. She looked that map over, sharp eyes picking out every detail, and she took a red pen and circled all the places she thought would be interesting to explore. 

The reality of the trip was different. It was _boring_ , all just talking with other, stuck-up kids who were afraid of adventure and her parents being constantly involved in meetings that they would never tell her what _for_ , and she could never sneak up with them to find out what they were always talking about with the other adults. She was more inclined to go searching for the trees for weird bugs and snakes, and visit all the marked areas on her little map without permission, instead of interacting with the other kids and learning how to debate, and that made her _weird_ .  
  
Not like she cared much. A kid called her a tree-hugger and a weirdo once and all she did was focus on climbing the very same tree he was mocking her for, trying to get to the top so she could look for birds. 

But there was some saving grace to that trip (at least at first)—a couple other kids like her, who had curiosity burning in their blood but didn't really fit in with the other rich kids, and when those same kids started calling them 'the Pariahs' the name stuck. 

This is where it all goes wrong:  
  
She is fourteen, and she has adventure burning in her blood, and she doesn't care that some parts of the island have been declared strictly off-limits by her parents, who took one look at her little map and shook their heads before pointing out all the spaces she _definitely_ wasn't supposed to go.  
  
But she never listened to the rules, anyway, not any longer than it took to decide whether or not she should ignore them, and the rest of the Pariahs think the same way as her when it comes to things like adventure and exploration. 

She's just a preteen, and she has fire in her eyes and a need to explore every little nook and cranny of the island, and she's commanding when she wants to be—it's that inner flame, that stubborn resolve, and a little bit of cunning honed through sneaking off of the bus when she got to her little elementary school when she was younger and walking down the streets to something far more interesting, no matter how her parents worried. 

It's another one of those rainy nights where the clouds hang low and thick and thunder rolls through the air, and that night all she can think of is exploring. 

There's some abandoned lab on the shore of the island, circled in red on her map. Her friend Felix says they used to experiment on war prisoners there way back when, and that's _cool_ , and that's something that makes her want to go there so badly that her bones ache. 

So she does, tugging her new friends along with it with little resistance.  
  
And then—

She discovers her second love in life here, though not at first.  
  
"Come on, it'll be fine!" Don't you wanna see what's inside?" she calls to Felix in accented English. (her first language was French and her second was Malagasay; she never quite managed to get rid of either accent, even now) She gives him a playful shove, trying to get him to go in. The only one of the Pariahs who didn't want to.  
  
Maybe she should have listened to him when he hesitated. 

She knows, deep down, she never would have. (that's just who she is—fiery and headstrong and caution was just a word in the dictionary to her, back then)  
  
When she and the Pariahs came into the lab, the others went for the old tools scattered on dusty workspaces. Broken beakers and rusted things with an unknown purpose, calling to the others with their mystery. Setting their minds to speculation—but Elodie's always noticed the details.  
  
There's a marking on the wall, here. Etched deep into the stone, so that the lines didn't fade for however long this place was left untouched. A few decades, maybe even more. She doesn't remember much about the history of the place, looking back on it. It was fourteen years ago, after all.  
  
But what she does remember:  
  
She runs her fingernails against the stone, over the grooves of the symbol. Some faded circle, although she can hardly tell what the rest of the linework was, the wall eroded by time. She wonders what it was for. Why was it carved into this place? Why—

A whisper interrupts her thoughts. Not from any one of the Pariahs; it doesn't come from behind her, but all around her. Burrowing into her head like a worm. It's a murmur, almost intelligible. She strains her ears for the sound—just as she's about to wonder what language it is, why she can almost but not _quite_ understand it, she sees something.  
  
Sees without seeing, because the vision is something that doesn't exist in the real world, she can tell. It's a vision held in her mind's eye, clear as day but visible to nobody else; the sound of distant thunder that she knows isn't the storm up above rolls through her bones. She sees… the island, charred black. Volcanic sand the color of obsidian overtakes the beach. The waves, in-dark, crash onto the shore—reaching, hungry, _wanting._ Wanting to swallow the island whole, and her with it.  
  
It's incomplete. Some part of it jars at her soul like broken glass. The circle needs something more. Something to charge it, something to _complete_ it—something that _sings_ to her, begging. 

The sand in front of her glistens, ice-cold and dark. 

In the vision, in the dream that is not a dream, she kneels on the shore and it feels as real as anything else. She plunges a finger into the ash-black shore and draws a circle; slashes a line through it on unnatural instinct. 

A thundercrack echoes through the air. A lightning flash outside the lab bursts through a nearby barred window with blinding light. The ground shifts and trembles and _cracks._

Her hand hurts. She realizes she's scraped her fingertips raw against the stone. Blood drips down over the etched circle in a line. 

It comes. 

Later, she learns many names for the Thing that took everything away from her. The Abyss. The Infinite. The Hole. The claws she imagines in the darkness of her room late at night, reaching for her hungrily—wanting to take her, too.  
  
Then, she only knows it as a soul-deep feeling in her body, cold as ice; paralyzing in its nature. It sucks the life and light out of her and with hungry, endless will, demands _more._ It wants her. It _wants_ her, and all the Pariahs with it—

—the scene of helplessness breaks. Her parents charge through the door; and Felix's parents, and all the other kids' parents, too, half-remembered years after the fact. They stream in shouting, and chanting, and here is where she learns the beauty of the occult: in strange instruments that hum and sing, in the way the claws hiss and flinch at their presence and the dark fog billowing through the floor stops coiling around her ankles, grasping (hungry)—

—but instead that black fog grasps around the ankles of her parents, instead, and as the building begins to crumble inward on itself her mother shrieks, " _Cours!"_ (Run!), and she scrambles to her feet and does so with blood still dripping down her hand and—

—she never sees them again. 

The mansion she lived in always seemed too big, for a girl and her two parents and her grandmother, but now it feels even bigger, for a girl without any parents at all. Empty. Numb. 

For a week she explores every nook and cranny of the mansion, searching up and down and through every room, leaving doors half-open as if her mother was just sleeping and she'll wander through rubbing at her eyes any moment now; as if her dad was just working outside and he'll come in from the backyard soon enough. Numb, unbelieving—they can't be gone. It feels like they're just on a business trip, and she's just waiting for them to come home. 

But they don't come home, because they never came back from that island, and she _did_ , and.

Sometimes, she wishes she would have been taken with them.  
  
At least she would still be with them, then.  
  
And this is how her life falls apart, and how she sits on the cold tile floor and sobs and then gets up and picks up the pieces:  
  
When she was six, she didn't believe in monsters. She got over her fear of the dark in the blink of an eye; if her parents were still here, she's sure they'd laugh and tell her she didn't have one at all.  
  
But she's fourteen, and her parents are gone now, and she is very, very alone, and the shadows press in like claws. 

Her grandmother takes care of her, through those dark times, and she loves her for it. She's her lifeline through those aching, lonely years, where she is still just a kid and she shouldn't have to learn about things like how grief feels like a thread pulling, pulling on her heart, threatening to tear it right out of her chest, and loss, and emptiness, and how it feels when she opens the door to her parents' bedroom and her grandmother finds her there in the threshold, sobbing, because for a second she thought they were just sleeping and then she _remembers_ —

And the house is so big, and she was at home in the sprawling city streets of Paris but staring up at the ceiling arching above her, she feels unmoored. Like the tether tying her to the earth snapped back at Dyer's island and now she's just adrift without a purpose. 

Nightmares follow her like shadows. This, here, is one thing she's grateful for: her grandmother's soothing voice, humming a lullaby to her in the dead of night, sitting next to her bed in a rocking chair as she lights a tea candle and tells her stories about a continent far, far away. 

One day, she resolves, she'll go there. 

One day, she resolves, she'll find out what really happened back there.  
  
One day, she resolves, she'll get her parents back. 

When she is twenty-three, her grandmother dies in her sleep. It's a sudden thing, no lead-up or warning; she's just… old, and she'd been using an oxygen tank for a while because her lungs were failing, and one day her body just… gave up. 

It's a peaceful death, at least. She died dreaming. 

It doesn't excuse the way she kneels at her fresh-dug grave after the funeral and sobs so hard it sounds like screaming. Her pain echoes up and through the heavens, tears rolling down her face like a waterfall because she was the _only_ family she had left and she's _gone_ now and she _left_ her and Elodie is alone now. Alone, alone, alone, and it _hurts._

She has a nightmare that night when she comes home exhausted from weeping and with her knees covered in dirt. When she wakes up covered in sweat she expects the familiar vanilla fragrance of a tea candle and an old woman by her bedside to tell her stories—or maybe for her to tell her grandmother some, because she's been researching what happened on that island years ago and she's been finding a _truth_ , she's been finding answers to the way darkness sat heavy in her bones and the way she was compelled to draw a line in blood over that circle, and her grandmother was more than happy to listen. 

But the only one who's listening now is her. The Pariahs stopped listening to her theories long ago, when she started talking about dark gods and ancient civilizations and the spidery claws that took her parents. 

She doesn't care anymore, she tells herself. 

And the next day she packs a suitcase (orange and black, her favorite colors) and she buys a ticket to Madagascar, and she decides she's going to search for answers firsthand. Nothing's tying her down to Paris now, anyway. 

A man contacts her a year after her first decision to travel the world. His name is Hazra Shah, and his offers throw her into something straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.  
  
Suddenly, she doesn't have time for the grief to consume her. She doesn't have time to feel the loneliness in the dregs of her soul; not when she's bouncing from continent to continent in search of leads, or in search of the items he requests, because somehow he can get his hands on things nobody else can. She wonders, a few times, what he wants the items _for_ —and wonders, a few times, who else he might have working for him. 

But she doesn't wonder for too long, because he's effective and _accurate_ , and piece by piece the puzzle begins to pull together. 

The time passes by in a blur. Her life is like one big treasure hunt, now; a search for the truth, _her_ truth, spanning the world. She steals an ancient manuscript from an archive and is rewarded with a lead for what she thought was a dead end; she follows that lead to its conclusion and in the end one of the many notebooks she has in her collection gets a few more names added to its pages. She cross-references victims' stories with each other, wondering: _Why me? Why us? Why did I have to suffer?_

Deep down, she knows the reason.  
  
The memory of the circle with the line cutting through it, her own lifeblood completing the sigil, haunts her.

Where once she fended her nightmares off with the scent of a tea candle and her grandmother's voice in a rhythm as she rocked back and forth and told her of a continent she could only dream of, now she fends it off with endless plane trips using the fortune her parents left her and a puzzle that never seems to be finished. 

It's an unpleasant surprise, the first time she has her work stolen. 

She comes home from a trip to the front door left unlocked. That's the first hint something's wrong.  
  
The second—much worse—is when she walks into the entrance hall and a potted plant has been knocked over; fallen on its side, the porcelain vase cracked, dirt spilled over the rug like a bloodstain.  
  
Her study is trashed. Her room, even more so. At least the intruders didn't touch her parents' old room, or her grandmothers'—small mercies, compared to the thought that what they stole (or, worse, destroyed with clumsy, grasping hands) has set her work behind by _months._ If not _years._ Notebooks are missing off the shelves, valuable artifacts simply _gone_ ; the sight of a shelf toppled on its side and books spilling out of it, pages crumpled and volumes disorganized, fills her with a kind of helpless rage. 

How dare they? _How dare they?_

She learns, later, the name of those who ruined her work—or, rather, one of many. They're a cult. Their presence in France goes by the name _la Vallée Noire_ ; the Black Valley, or more accurately, the Black Vale. 

She learns to both hate and fear them. Hate them, for what they try to do—this is not the first time they will try to break into her house, to steal and trash her work—and to fear them, for how they try to hurt her. 

She earns a bullet scar crashing across the side of her left bicep from when she went exploring rural Japan in search of a lead and a member of the Vale shot at her from the apartment next door. She earns a star-shaped knife scar criss-crossing over her torso, below her rib, from where she was stabbed; any luckier, and the man who attacked her could have punctured a lung.

Her work has attracted some dangerous attention. Why, she can't say, but all the myths she's collected of ancient civilizations trying to restore the Thing that took her parents lurks in her head, and she has an idea. 

The rumors of human sacrifice surround the Vale like a cloud of flies. To anyone else, that might be a deterrent—but not her. Not when she's still on the search for answers. Not when she's still searching on the promise that she might be able to get her parents back some fateful day.  
  
So she continues her work for the Collector, and she continues dodging blades in the dark and starts moving from place to place—rarely does she ever inhabit her mansion, now, and she makes sure the bulk of her work can be packed away in a suitcase. She keeps moving, makes sure she doesn't stay in one place for too long (easy to do, with her kind of work), and bit by bit, she pieces together parts of a whole.  
  
This is how the story ends:  
  
After five long years, she finds herself back in Paris. The early morning sparkles with mist, and she's wandering down the streets she used to run away from her father in as a kid. The thought makes her heart skip a beat and tears threaten to bead in her eyes, but as always, she pushes it away with the thought of her work. The thought that one day, if she just tries hard enough, if she just picks up enough of the pieces, she _has_ to see her parents again.

A shadowy figure turns out of one of the alleyways she walks by.  
  
She only notices the person following her a few minutes after the fact, and curses to herself. She didn't think the Vale would find her here so soon. How _did_ they find her here so soon? She just arrived here by plane a day ago, and she's been staying in a hotel this whole time. Surely they wouldn't have heard this quickly. 

She manages to lose her tail in the twisting Paris streets—this was once _her_ city, she knows it better than anyone else—but the encounter rattles her. 

She figures out the reason the Vale are here when she finally makes it to the catacomb entrance she was searching for. Acting on a hunch; connecting the dots between one obscure manuscript and another, and it turns out her intuition is probably right.  
  
Although the sight of the hooded figures climbing down into the Paris catacombs one by one does little to calm her nerves. 

Most likely, the skull she's after is significant to them and the forces they worship in some way. Maybe they're looking to put together the inscription on the rumored set of skulls like the Collector has. Maybe there's just some sort of power in the skull itself. 

Either way, she intends to get to it first. She's powered through worse obstacles than a gathering of the local cultists.

It takes her a couple of extra minutes to circle around and find another way in. As much as the time loss grates on her—she's now competing to find the skull, in a competition where the price for losing is at best a lost lead and at worst death—all common sense deters her from entering the catacombs the same way the cultists did. She's not going to wander directly behind them and end up stabbed because one of them looked back. 

Some fancy tech, a collapsed wall, and a good old-fashioned shovel, and she's on her way in. 

It's almost stereotypically creepy. Her only lighting is a industrial-grade flashlight, clasped tightly in one hand, and the backup flashlight in her backpack. Water condenses on the stone roof above her and drips onto the ground, providing a steady _drip-drip-drip_ of white noise. Her breathing feels like the loudest thing in this tomb of the dead. 

Old Malagasy myths come back to her as she wanders down the halls. Traditions of respecting the dead, of providing their bodies a safe place to rest as their souls become ancestors, and the warnings of what might happen when one angers those souls of those who came before reverberate in her head. 

Finally, the beam of her flashlight hits a row of skulls. She's been through enough in her travels that the sight no longer shocks her; yet a chill still runs down her spine as she kneels in front of them, looking over their foreheads and making eye contact with their empty sockets. 

In better conditions, she'd ask the remains if she could disturb them. Old traditions that her parents followed even in the "modern era"; devoting her life to the occult has taught her the power and safety in the old ways.  
  
But these are not better conditions, and there is currently a cult down here in these catacombs with her, and she kneels to examine the skulls with a kind of measured urgency, not wanting to overlook the inscription but knowing she needs to get _moving_ —

—looking back on it, she should have really looked over her shoulder.

The baseball bat comes with a blinding _crack!_ of pain before everything goes black. 

She's seeing double when she comes to on the shoulder of a man in a dark robe.  
  
Well, good news: the Vale didn't decide to kill her on the spot.  
  
Bad news: that means they're planning to kill her later, probably in a worse way.  
  
The adrenaline that begins to pump through her body is almost enough to override the dizzying headache she has. Concussion, considering she blacked out for long enough for him to pick her up there. That's gonna be one hell of a doctor's visit. 

If she gets out of here. _Focus._

The man isn't used to her weight. He's holding her awkwardly over his shoulder, so that she's not quite evenly balanced. Her torso is hanging lower to the ground than her legs, allowing her to reach forward with careful movements and hook her fingers into the eye sockets of an errant skull. 

_Sorry_ , she thinks, _but I need to save my own life._

In a single, solid swing, she reaches up and cracks the skull against her kidnapper's head. He loses his balance; she rolls off of his shoulder into a wall of bones and hits the ground running.  
  
_Get out, get out, get out_ —

Her footsteps aren't the only ones echoing down the chambers. She turns a hard left, then a right; if she had entered the way she wanted to, she would have been able to navigate this part of the catacombs with some ease, having studied a map beforehand, but with the different entrance she's running blind. It's all she can do to outrun her pursuers—turning, she glances to the side to knock down another precarious wall of bones, wincing internally but hoping the avalanche slows the cultists behind her—

—when she turns a corner and looks back ahead of her, she's met with the cold, unyielding face of someone hooded and the sharp pain of a knife in her side. 

The shockwave of a stab wound ripples through her body, and she flinches, crying out and stumbling back, clasping a shocked hand around the handle of the blade.  
  
Behind her, a man snatches the knife from her kidney as if pulling it out of a sheath, grabs her by the hair, and slits her throat.  
  
Warmth floods down her throat in a way that she knows it shouldn't. Trembling, she falls to her knees—clasping hands to her throat and trying desperately to take in a breath, only to choke on her own blood. It fills her mouth and boils over; spilling out from between her lips, flowing in thick rivulets to puddle on the floor.  
  
Her vision blurs. Dizziness overtakes her; she can hear her heartbeat in her ears. 

She falls to her side on the cold stone floor. 

Darkness sings in her bones. Something incomplete, something unfinished, calls to her from a distance. The memory of a vision of ink-black waters and an obsidian beach overtakes her drifting thoughts. Unnatural instinct calls to her.

She drags her hand into the puddle of blood in front of her and draws, next to it—a circle. Cuts it with a line. 

She feels something cold as ice creep into her soul; something so large it swallows her up trying to comprehend it drags talons over the nape of her neck. 

It comes. 

The black fog coils around her ankles, her being, her soul, and swallows her whole.  
  
( and this is where the story starts again:  
  
death is only the beginning. )

**Author's Note:**

> nobody writes for Elodie so I decided to out of spite and love for her character


End file.
